The liberal blog of Matthew Rozsa, a PhD student of American history at Lehigh University. As a political columnist, his work has appeared in more than half a dozen publications, among them PolicyMic, "The Morning Call," "The Newark Star-Ledger," "The Trenton Times," "The Express Times," and university newspapers for Bard College and Rutgers-Newark.
He can be reached at mlr511@lehigh.edu.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Conservative Commentary on the Times Square Incident

"Human Events" is a weekly conservative magazine, with Robert Spencer's column JihadWatch ranking among its most virulent Muslim-bashing columns.It should be a sobering sign to this country that, in his latest article, the words he pens are absolutely right.Times Square Jihad? What Jihad?by Robert Spencer(more by this author)Posted 05/11/2010 ET

Now that would-be Times Square car bomb jihadist Faisal Shahzad has been exposed as an Islamic jihadist, the liberal media are searching for an explanation, any explanation, for his attempted attack that doesn’t involve Islamic jihad.

Shahzad himself said he was acting in revenge for American drone attacks against Islamic jihadists in Pakistan. This establishes his jihadist leanings all the more vividly. But, according to clinical psychologist James Monahan of the University of New Haven, Shahzad was “the runt of the litter; the child who couldn't meet his parents’ expectations.” Or “maybe he was starting to see the hopes of living the good life in America die and he began feeling like a failure.”

Ezra Klein, writing in the Washington Post, was even more fanciful. Noting that Shahzad defaulted on the mortgage on his home in Connecticut and that the property is now in foreclosure, Klein discovered a brand-new motivation for jihadist violence: “Foreclosures generate an enormous amount of misery and anxiety and depression that can tip people into all sorts of dangerous behaviors that don’t make headlines but do ruin lives. And for all that we’ve done to save the financial sector, we’ve not done nearly enough to help struggling homeowners.”

In other words, the U.S. government had better bail out struggling homeowners, or car bombs will start going off all over the U.S.

Meanwhile, MSNBC talking head Contessa Brewer had her own reason to feel “an enormous amount of misery and anxiety and depression”: Shahzad turned out to be a Muslim. “There was a part of me,” lamented Brewer, “that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country.”

Brewer explained that she hoped that Shahzad’s jihad would not give rise to a resurgence of what she actually called “outdated bigotry.” This is a common mainstream media preoccupation that manifests itself in a flood of articles about Muslim fears of this “backlash” every time there is an attempted or successful jihad terror attack in America or Europe. The only thing that never appears is the backlash itself, which remains more a figment of the leftist media’s imagination than an actual threat against innocent Muslims.

Nonetheless, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was also preoccupied with this phantom backlash threat, warning New Yorkers to avoid any action against Muslims or Pakistanis. Bloomberg ought to be ashamed of himself. He should have been making statements about protecting Americans of all creeds, and calling the Muslim community in America to account for its tolerance of jihadists. There has never been a backlash against innocent Muslims in the U.S. It is a fiction that we hear about only when a Muslim plots mass murder of Americans. And then we hear about it endlessly, as if Muslims were the victims rather than the perpetrators.

Even before Shahzad was arrested, the leftist media were in full denial. Nation columnist Robert Dreyfuss was confident that the Times Square bomber would turn out to be a right-wing extremist: “It may be that the Pakistan-based Taliban, the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), has quietly established a Connecticut franchise while we weren’t looking.

That’s possible. But it seems far more likely to me that the perpetrator of the bungled Times Square bomb plot was either a lone wolf or a member of some squirrely branch of the Tea Party, anti-government far right, which actually exists in Connecticut, where, it seems, the car’s license plates were stolen.”

He spent five months in Pakistan, including some time in Peshawar, a center of al Qaeda and Taliban activity. Shahzad parked outside the offices of Viacom, the parent company of Comedy Central, which presents “South Park,” the cartoon whose creators were just threatened with death by Islamic supremacists in New York for daring to lampoon Muhammad. The Muslim group that issued the threat, Revolution Muslim, was proselytizing in Times Square just hours before Shahzad’s car bomb was discovered.

The Times Square car bomb indicates yet again the persistence and determination of the jihadists who are targeting the United States—and of the continuing refusal of the mainstream media to admit that that jihad exists.